by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured
the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of
general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far
preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself
a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged
him still further. He married quite early in life; and his wife, who
was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent,
bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself.
During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his
poems, and thought to publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a
paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and
would hear no more a suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented
the world with a very learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian
poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original
poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume "Dante in Verona,
and other Poems;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of
publication again took possession of him. I have been told that a
sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his
fortieth year, led him to conquer his scruples, and finally arrange
his pieces. But he was singularly fastidious; the arrangement would
never please him; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the
sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve
years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their
persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the "Poems"
in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of
admiration which was practically universal.
It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes
these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on
my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of
twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely
clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbe;
the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then
usual to say--to my thinking more like that of Chaucer--in any case a
head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color
and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets;
they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a
piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being
stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice
capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage
and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice
so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its
absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel
Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own
studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in
this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on
various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own
and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a
beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been
seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful
courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on
a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of
mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not
describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart
from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a
genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me
that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with
the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?"
said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political
events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him
deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal
of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out
of window into the living street were rare, and formed no
characteristic part of his scheme of life.
As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate
utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has
characterized these qualities in words which leave no later
commentator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be
totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to
allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the
external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was
brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest
students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter
of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own
_magnum opus_ of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very
salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not
at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own
work:
"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be
as _amusing_ (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class
of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it
alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out
of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably,
observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing
all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no
margin for discursiveness."
During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was
clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament--sleeplessness.
To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and
concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new
drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its
effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more
necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and
excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in
which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as
Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally
a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily
that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the
victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote
brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his
death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature
powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the
superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of
the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to
secure the elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met
at last, it was too late.
So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have
retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the
plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene--a medical
experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery
originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is
doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through
more than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a
tyrant, and from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there
was no reason why he should not, for at least a score of years, have
produced noble pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a
personal success which he would have extended, though he hardly could
have raised it. Yet he was always a melancholy man; of late years he
had become almost a solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had
disbanded his body-guard, and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a
longer life would not have brought much enjoyment with it. But these
are idle speculations, and we have rather to call to our remembrance
the fact that one of the brightest and most distinguished of our race,
a man whose very existence was a protest against narrowness of aim and
feebleness of purpose, one of the great torch-bearers in the
procession of English art, has been called from us in the prime of
life, before the full significance of his genius had been properly
felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet
there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly
original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are
laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his
signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of
our intellectual history.
[Signature of the author.]
GUSTAVE DORE[11]
[Footnote 11: Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."]
By KENYON COX
(1832-1883)
[Illustration: Gustave Dore.]
It is now eleven years since Gustave Dore died. He was an officer of
the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was
probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name
was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and
embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and
misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most
astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he
wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor,
and because the artists and critics of France never seriously
recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim
of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was
over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the
emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and
considered a great moral force--a "preacher painter"--by others he has
been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a
man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful
power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard
Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the
first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Dore's
own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them,
the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this
article.
The main facts of Dore's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was
born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg,
near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the
Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the
department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to
account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery
which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in
life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil
in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he
might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an
engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was
of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes,
and of an athletic temperament. Theophile Gautier afterward called him
a "gamin de genie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in
Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and
showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and
sent a letter to Dore's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to
remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once
and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began
his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of
work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how
many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late,
and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic
papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books.
One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with
having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr.
Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one
year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was
sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy
Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes
Drolatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was
done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments
of their art. We all know the books that followed.
Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while
flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at
great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would
not accept them, were hugely admired in the Dore Gallery of London.
Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to
Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to
the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out
with excessive production--a great name, but an unsatisfied man.
Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with
Dore the illustrator, and then with Dore the painter and sculptor. It
is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at
Dore's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.
Dore's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a
quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and
caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold
himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not
hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher
qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were
vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a
recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier
work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny--to many
minds it is even painful--but it is unmistakably caricature of a
dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that
by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that
formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it
is essential to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of
his later work--that which is most praised and most blamed in his
production--are inherent in the work of this period, and are best
explained by a reference to the latter.
Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and
of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this
as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps,
with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of
executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer
sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising
that his critics have not seen that Dore's battles are always, even to
the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven
heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their
bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the
slightest attempt to realize carnage--only to convey, by the
caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible
bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it
seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is
absurd.
The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Dore has
received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his
painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds
of one great writer after another. But Dore identified himself with no
one; he was always Dore. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep
to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better
than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and
"Gallic wit" in the "Contes Drolatiques," but it was not broad enough
for Dore, and he has converted its most human characters into
impossible grotesques.
Another thing for which Dore is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr.
Jerrold repeats more than once Dore's phrase, "I have lots of
collodion in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced
to make sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also
speaks of Dore's system of dividing and subdividing a subject, and
noting the details in their places, so that he could reproduce the
whole afterward. This question of work from memory is one of the most
vital for an understanding of Dore, and one of general interest in all
matters of art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made
hundreds of drawings every year could not work much from nature, and
came to rely upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic
memory, and how does it perform its task? We think the truth is, that
the artist who habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not
from memory of the object, but from memory of the way he has formerly
drawn similar objects. He reverts to a series of formulae that he has
gradually accumulated. This man must have a cloak. This is the way a
cloak is done. A hand? Nothing can be easier; the hand formula is
ready. The stock in trade of the professional illustrator and
caricaturist is made up of a thousand such formulae--methods of
expression that convey the idea readily enough to the spectator, but
have little relation to fact. So it is that Dore never learned, in the
true sense, to draw. He had made for himself a sort of artistic
shorthand, which enabled him to convey his superabundant ideas quickly
and certainly to his public, but his drawing is what is called
mannered in the extreme. It is not representation of nature at all,
but pure formula and chic. He is said to be a master of drapery, but
he never drew a single fold correctly. He is said to show great
knowledge of Gothic architecture, but he never drew well a single
column or finial. In his later years he studied anatomy with great
perseverance, and advocated the necessity of dissection, saying, "Il
faut fourrer la main dedans" (You must stick your hand in it); but the
manner was formed, and he never drew a leg with a bone in it.
With this equipment he illustrated Don Quixote, Dante, the Bible. Is
it strange that he shows no sympathy with the grand simplicity of
Dante, or the subtle humor of Cervantes, and that we can only be
thankful that he never completed his projected illustrations to
Shakespeare? Dore, the illustrator, was fecund beyond precedent,
possessed a certain strange drollery, had a wonderful flow of ideas,
but was superficial, theatrical, and mannered, and as far from
expressing real horror as from expressing real fun. What shall we say
of Dore the painter and sculptor?
Mr. Jerrold reports a discussion between Dore and Theophile Gautier,
in which the roles of artist and man of letters are strangely
reversed. "Gautier and Dore," he says, "disagreed fundamentally on the
aims and methods of art. Gautier loved correctness, perfect form--the
technique, in short, of art; whereas Dore contended that art which
said nothing, which conveyed no idea, albeit perfect in form and
color, missed the highest quality and raison d'etre of art." What is
plain from this is, that Gautier was an artist and cared first of all
for art, while Dore was never an artist, properly speaking, at all,
and never understood the artist's passion for perfection. To Dore,
what was necessary was to express himself anyhow--who cared if the
style was defective, the drawing bad, the color crude? The idea was
the thing. His admirers can defend him only on this ground, and they
adopt of necessity the Philistine point of view. The artists of Dore's
time and country were very clear in their opinion. "The painters,"
says Mr. Jerrold, "said he could not paint."
The sculptors admitted that he had ideas in his groups, but he was not
sculpturesque. His friends protest against this judgment, and
attribute it, _ad nauseam_, to "malevolence" and "envy." What if his
technique was less brilliant than that of Hals, they say; what if his
shadows are less transparent than those of Rembrandt (and they will
make no meaner comparison)? He is "teeming with noble thoughts," and
these will put his work "on a level with the masterpieces of the
Italian masters of the sixteenth century." It is the conception, the
creation--not the perfect painting of legs and arms and heads, the
harmonious grouping, the happy and delicate combination of color--by
which the observer is held spell bound. All these qualities, which
his admirers grudgingly admit that Dore had not, are classed as "mere
dexterity," and are not considered worth a second thought.
This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist,
and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or
will ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value
of a work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art
in itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from
oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if
not the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all
(granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be
infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the
noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Dore's thoughts is
therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and
sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical
imperfections--his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude
color--relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such
reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those
altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability
to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as
surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters
as Van Der Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an
art is loved and understood.
COMPOSERS
HANDEL
By C. E. BOURNE
(1685-1759)
George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is
the master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February
23, 1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at
the time of his birth--a terribly severe old man, who, almost before
his son was born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The
little child knew nothing of the fate before him, he only found that
he was never allowed to go near a musical instrument, much as he
wanted to hear its sweet sounds, and the obstinate father even took
him away from the public day-school for the simple reason that the
musical gamut was taught there in addition to ordinary reading,
writing, and arithmetic.
But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed
to procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb
spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the
sound, was found for the child, and this he used to keep hidden in the
garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone was
asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his
patients.
[Illustration: Handel.]
But, at last, when George Frederick was seven years of age, the old
man was compelled to change his views. It happened in this way. He set
out one day on a visit to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels,
where another son by a former marriage was a page. George Frederick
had been teasing his father to let him go with him to see his elder
brother, whom he had not yet met, but this was refused. When old
Handel started by the stagecoach the next morning, the persistent
little fellow was on the watch; he began running after it, and at
length the father was constrained to stop the coach and take the boy
in. So, though at the expense of a severe scolding, the child had his
way and was allowed to go on to Saxe-Weissenfels. When there, the
chapel, with the beautiful organ, was the great attraction, and George
Frederick, as indomitable then as he was in after-life, found his way
into the organ loft, and when the regular service was over, contrived
to take the organist's place, and began a performance of his own; and
strange to say, though he had not had the slightest training, a melody
with chords and the correct harmonies was heard. The duke had not left
the chapel, and noticing the difference in style from that of the
ordinary organist, inquired as to the player, and when the little boy
was brought to him he soon discovered, by the questions he put, the
great passion for music which possessed the child. The duke, a
sensible man, told the father it would be wrong to oppose the
inclination of a boy who already displayed such extraordinary genius;
and old Handel, either convinced, or at any rate submitting to the
duke's advice, promised to procure for his son regular musical
instruments. Handel never afterward forgot the debt of gratitude he
owed to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels for this intercession.